Cost of e-commerce site

[Mr Happy]

For all you experts !
Does £5000 sound alot for a bespoke e-commerce site with around 150 products?

regards:cool:

[FireFleur]

How long is a piece of string?

Oddly, but very obviously to most computer folk, the number of products above 3 doesn't really have a bearing on the time too much, your product page will most likely get templated and it only matters who is responsible for getting the content into digital form. What matters more are the number of attributes and how they relate.

So 5,000 pounds how much development time has that bought you?

Ecommerce takes about 1 month to develop from scratch normal working hours, can take longer to get it very smooth so say 2 months, that's 320 hours.

5,000 / 320 = 15 per hour.

I suspect they are on 30 per hour, costing out to one month. So, can they complete this in one month, and 30 per hour means you probably have a beginning developer so who knows what the code base will be like by the end.

You have got photography as well, that costs, and you have got to produce the content, that will cost, any imagery etc.

5K seems low, but they could complete in time, and perhaps they charge for any extras.

[mke]

With the greatest of respect, this has been done so many thaousand times before and the best features are now widely available, free, as Open Source software. Well established, well supported, tried and trusted. Your idea is not unique, take a look around you. There are literally thousands of templates around, too. For anyone about to jump in to say they all look alike, the fact is there are a limited number of ways you can skin a cart. The last person to show me their "bespoke" cart with a view to me constructing something similar for them, I thought it was Cubecart and the colleagues I showed it to all thought it was Zencart. The prospective customer had convinced himself it was unique. Probably still thinks so, who am I to rub the bad news in?

So why not spend the money on something you will really need, like training to use it properly, administrative help to populate it, if they are your own goods so no suppliers' marketing materials to go with them, the sort of photography and presentation FireFleur mentions? Even keeping a proportion of it for a few beers will be less of a waste of money than reinventing the wheel. It's been done.

[FireFleur]

Bespoke is nice, for many reasons, but it costs.

The people with bespoke nowadays tend to be developers :) Big ecommerce use commercial, and the other stuff tends to be OS.

There are problems with OS, but you could use it to test the waters, and if you only have 5K to spend it would be better spent elsewhere. Once the things is proven, you can go bespoke or commercial.

There is a sweet spot with OS and it is the development and kernel arena.

[mke]

Several of our customers report having used proprietary - commercial as you call it - before coming to us and using Zencart. Zencart, in their opinion, is better. Versatility, ease of use, optimisation are among the things they have told us about. Their experience. They are the ones doing the business.

Whatever the reasons for your preference of proprietary, they are your preferences. With the likes of IBM, HP and other, top quality, IT names putting serious money into Open Source, Google and others being entirely run on Open Source, and proprietary companies like M$ not handing back a penny in recompense for dumping bummers like Vista on the market, I know which avenue I'd trust.

As I said, the best features of ecommerce are available in Open Source ecommerce applications. These are serious, enterprise ready applications. Not developers' playthings and not deserving of disdain from anyone with any inkling of what they're talking about.

[FireFleur]

All open source is not the same :)

Zen Cart for example is GPL and that means if you distribute any of the code, i.e. give it to a developer to work on they have the right to redistribute that code to who ever they like, and that means a direct competitor if they choose, who then also gains that right.

Then we have the problem of the source being open, and therefore easier to find compromise by direct reading of the source, and the ability to set it up for fuzzing.

Then you come to the codebase itself, and the coding being open source doesn't make it great by default.

The best open source are not developer's playthings as you put it, but robust tools designed to create bespoke solutions on top off. That is bepsoke, using open source tools to create unique solutions for competitive edge, certainly not something developers with a few decades of experience would disdain :)

[mke]

Correct on the GPL. Genuine, healthy, open competition in the classical capitalist sense. None of those legalistic market distortions. ;)

Agreed, too, that there is much poor quality code in OS. But that tends not to enter the mainstream. Hobbyists are welcome to their hobbies, IMHO. They may not be much use, but they're doing no harm either. Also, there is as much within failed attempts at proprietary apps.

We can agree on improved software for whatever purpose the developer chooses using, e.g. the Apache software licence, but don't dismiss GPL out of hand. Whatever its shortcomings, and there certainly are some, there is a great deal of very robust and reliable stuff available under it.

[FireFleur]

Ok twice now you have claimed things about me that are not true :)

I don't have a preference for proprietary, all my systems, are Arch Linux, Gentoo, OpenBSD, Familiar, FreeBSD, or OpenWRT, I don't use closed programming languages unless I am converting over a system, read Java to Python, and Java is now open.

I don't dismiss the GPL out of hand, it has its place in business, generally for hardware drivers.

But the GPL for something like ZenCart is a problem, it makes it hard to pay for extensions and not allow your competition to use it. Only the author of ZenCart can do that.

Open Source is something that has been around for a long time, and it is primarily for developers, users just see the free as in beer we all know that, they don't look at the source code.

I have just had a gander at ZenCart source and it is typical PHP style coding, sort of ok but messy, it is hobbyist coding as you put it.

ZenCart will be ok for the OP, to just install and work out the interface himself. I certainly wouldn't advise paying for support.

When the business expands, then he will be in a better position to evaluate wether to go bespoke, commercial, or stick with ZenCart, but for ZenCart to be heralded as some sort of enterprise solution, is a bit far fetched. And he needs to go into the proposition with his eyes open, there coud be problems with the licencing for him.

[PrettyPaws]

Seems a lot to me but then our site www.prettypawsaccessories.co.uk (http://www.prettypawsaccessories.co.uk) cost about £350 + £40 per month. It really does depend what you call "bespoke"

[Steve2507]

Seems a lot to me but then our site www.prettypawsaccessories.co.uk (http://www.prettypawsaccessories.co.uk) cost about £350 + £40 per month. It really does depend what you call "bespoke"
I'd agree, our sites use VPASP as the base but have been so heavily modified they could be classed as bespoke.

[maria102]

This thread might help http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=95205&highlight=cost+ecommerce

[mke]

Useful post, maria102. Thanks for that.

FireFleur, let's agree to agree on most things and to disagree on a few for now. It's the OP's thread, not ours. All he asked for was an opinion and now he has several. I'd love to continue the debate, but not on somebody else's thread on an entirely different topic. Apologies for the initial misinterpretation on my part.

[matt.chatterley]

For all you experts !
Does £5000 sound alot for a bespoke e-commerce site with around 150 products?

regards:cool:

Some other good points made in this thread, so will not repeat too much -however.

Seems high to me - but that is entirely subjective. What are you getting for your £5k? Do you feel you are getting "value for money"? :)

[alphanumeric]

tbh it aint high ive worked on ecommerce systems that have cost over £50k, its just all subjective. Some require daily updates and features that are developed over the space of years.

however its really hard to judge if £5000 sounds right as i dont know what you need to make you require a bespoke system. Go to a decent developer who has built a few and chances are they will have 90% of the code all ready written.

So if its a fairly simple bespoke system that just requires intergration in to warehouse/stock with the ability to generate custom monthy reports.

Then on the basis that most of the code is allready done then £5000 seems about right.

[FireFleur]

A bespoke system normally transfers copyright to the person paying.

So, if you are reusing code you have to have the copyright to the code.

The problem is someone will have paid for your 90% in the belief they owned that code, and only they could allow others to use that code.

There are ways to license, and a hybrid open source, with restriction on distribution can work quite well.

[penguin_comel]

i can help u to setup the e-commerce site using the open source . and just pay to me £100 . and i will buy the domain and hosting to you ..

[SillyJokes]

For all you experts !
Does £5000 sound alot for a bespoke e-commerce site with around 150 products?

regards:cool:

It is not a lot of money if you then go on to sell £500,000 worth in your first year, however it's a great deal if you only manage £20K.

Will the products be fully loaded? This itself takes time to do properly. Will the site work well for SEO from the beginning?

The cost of getting a cheap website however could be considerably more than £5000 because you may never get the darn thing done properly and could end up loosing heart before it starts performing and it will look like everyone elses' website even to the untrainedeye meaning that you loose a years trading- far more than £5K.

Do you truly know your products will sell well or are you just setting up a site with some stuff you are interested in without a clue whether anyone else wants to buy it?

[Mr Happy]

Hi

I already have a site which has been working well cos me just £400, but I need more features. The company that set it up, is now out of business and quotes from other companies to update it has been £900 plus. So am thinking of getting a brand new all singing and dancing site but the quotes for what I want have been coming in at anything from £2000 to £12000.
Am lookin at a company called Net Biz Solutions, as any
one heard of them? Thy seem very good.

[maria102]

Net Biz have a great portfolio, what sort of quote are you getting from them?

[SillyJokes]

Hi

I already have a site which has been working well cos me just £400, but I need more features. The company that set it up, is now out of business and quotes from other companies to update it has been £900 plus

I think this shows that a cheap site is of no benefit to either the client or the developer.

[DesignsOnline]

We build bespoke SEO designed Ecommerce Websites (http://www.designsonline.co.uk/Ecommerce-&-Website-Designer.html).
I have sent you a pm with some details, feel free to call and discuss your requirements.

Freelance Website Designers (http://www.freelance-website-designers.co.uk)

[ServersandSpares]

I would advise you not to go with a developer just because they have a great looking portfolio, as this can be very misleading as we once found out to our considerable cost. Make sure you have a lengthy conversation about your needs now and what you might need the site to do in the future, and if at all possible, go with somebody near to where you are based so you can meet with them rather than just doing everything by phone or mail.
Julie

[DesignsOnline]

Thats a good point you need to make sure that the portfolio is actually of genuine live websites that you can visit and were actually built by that designer.

Lots of people just display snapshots of templates or even incompleted template websites they have bought to pad out their portfolio, and appear to have skills they actually done have at all.

Warm Regards,
Joe

[batespcm]

£5000 seems on the high side but then it depends what that is made up of, what solutions you require etc etc

some more details would really be needed to know if you were getting value for money!

[lyndseyg]

Mr Happy,

I've just opened a new online shop and, like you, really wanted a bespoke shop. I didn't want it to have a packaged feel at all.

I ended up going down a middle road and had a shop created by a brilliant designer using pre packaged software. He charged me £900 all in for the whole thing and the backend system has everything I need. I'd really recommend him.

My site is roseandgrey dot co dot uk and he's called Martin at Full Phat Design if you are interested.

Good luck

Lyndsey